With the advent of the Internet, individual users, businesses, educational institutions, recreational institutions, and the like request and receive vast amounts of useful and entertaining content from a variety of sources. For example, requests are made over the Internet to web sites provided by news agencies, informational systems, and entertainment systems. Such requests typically include the user entering a uniform resource locator (URL) for the desired web site into an Internet browser application on the user's local computer. The content request travels across the Internet to the specified web site, and the user may then view or download information by pulling that information back across the Internet to the user's local computer.
In recent years, it has become popular for a variety of information content providers, particularly broadcast media providers such as news broadcast organizations, to package content according to the desires of their subscribers and transmit that content via satellite or via cable directly to the user's home, office, school, and the like. Once the information is received at the user's site, the information is stored in a local cache for later review by the user. For example, a user may subscribe to a popular sports news network to have the sports news network broadcast on an hourly basis all news clips pertaining to a given sport, for example basketball, or pertaining to a given sports team. Accordingly, each hour the content subscribed to by the user is packaged by the sports news network and broadcast via satellite or via cable to the user's local computer where it is stored for later review by the user.
Typically, the broadcast organizations that package information for delivery as described above also simultaneously publish that information on an Internet web site operated by each of those organizations. Often, a user logs onto the user's local personal computer and using their Internet browser application enters the URL of an Internet web site to obtain content to which the user has subscribed under the broadcast content mechanism, described above. For example, even if the user has subscribed to a sports news organization to have the sports information for a given sport sent to the user's home on a periodic basis, the user may still enter the URL of the Internet web site of the same sports news organization to receive the identical content that already has been broadcast to the user's home and has been stored for review by the user. Unfortunately, the user may have forgotten that the content the user is now requesting is available on the local cache, or the user may believe that the content the user is requesting is of a newer version or is otherwise different from the content stored on the local cache.
If the user's second content request is provided from the requested web site, the user will receive the identical content already stored on the local cache. Unfortunately, the user will have needlessly tied up the resources, including data link bandwidth and processing time, required to pull the content across the Internet to the user's local computer even though the requested content is already stored locally for access by the user.
It is with respect to these and other considerations that the present invention has been made.